Date

Country

Sites

Keywords

Region

Africa
Arab States
Asia and the Pacific
Europe and North America
Latin America and the Caribbean

First Workshop "Creating the Enabling Environment" to develop guiding principles and policies for World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism

6-8 March 2008

Workshop organized by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, in partnership with IUCN, ICOMOS, ICCROM and the France-UNESCO Convention, in collaboration with the Arc et Senans World Heritage site and with financial support from the French Ministry of Culture.

UNESCO's World Heritage Centre is engaged in an ambitious year-and-a-half-long initiative to develop working principles and policies for sustainable tourism at World Heritage sites. This workshop is the first in a series envisaged to craft tourism- and visitor-management "working principles" for adoption by the World Heritage Centre, the World Heritage Advisory Bodies, related United Nations agencies and the tourism industry.

The goal is to develop a set of common working methods which would lead to the adoption of a common set of management tools, forming the bases of a World Heritage programme which would in turn result in the development of a pool of experts who would refine these methods and train World Heritage site staff. This would facilitate the establishment of regional and sub-regional learning platforms using a World Heritage site as a hub to increase the training of trainers, and assist site managers, local communities and Member States in addressing the growing impact of tourism and in maximizing tourism benefits.

The workshop seeks to identify the key issues related to tourism planning, concessions and site financing and to outline the requisite joint action to address these matters through sound practical approaches and methods. The workshop objectives include drawing up:

A list of recommendations for addressing the issues in the concept paper

A list of concise statements of working principles for the workshop issues

An action plan for next steps in achieving the conditions outlined in the working principles

Discussion will be organised along the following lines :

Reach agreement with the working group on the meaning, content and degree of importance of each of the agreed priorities

List ideal conditions to be met in addressing each of these issues

List common obstacles to these conditions in order to focus on practical solutions

Draft a list of recommendations on innovative solutions to address each issue

Draw up a first draft of the working principles for tourism planning, concessions and site financing

Expected results :

Formation of a working group to advise the World Heritage Centre on the issues of tourism- and public use planning, concessions and site-finance planning

A list of recommendations to improve the management effectiveness of tourism- and public- use planning, concessions and site-finance planning

Recommendations on training and an outline of existing training materials and initiatives

A draft list of working principles for tourism- and public use planning, concessions and site-finance planning

A follow-up action plan to meet the needs outlined in the recommendations outlined above